Teaching Faculty

Professor Ruth McDonald

Before entering academia Ruth spent 11 years as a senior manager in the NHS including two years as a hospital finance director. She joined the University of Nottingham in 2013 where she was Professor of Healthcare Innovation and Learning. She has also held posts at the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool (where she obtained her PhD) and Leeds, and she spent one year as a Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her research concerns change and resistance in healthcare organisations. Much of this has focused on financial incentives to change behaviour (‘Pay for Performance’) in the UK and beyond and she has published widely on the subject.

She has provided advice to a range of bodies including the Department of Health and The Health Foundation in the UK, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Research Council of Norway.

John Clark

John Clark has had an extensive career involved in medical leadership and engagement activities in the UK and internationally through past roles as a chief executive of hospitals, director of a university health policy unit and national director of leadership development for the NHS (England) which included leading the joint Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and NHS Institute’s Enhancing Engagement in Medical Leadership project.

Over the past twenty years, he has been involved in designing medical leadership programmes for a variety of international health systems, organisations and universities as part of the wider cultural change to engage doctors more in leadership at specialty, hospital and system levels. He is currently a Senior Fellow at The King’s Fund as well as Adjunct Associate Professor at the Institute of Clinical Leadership, University of Warwick Medical School. He is also Advisor to the Institute of Health Leadership, Department of Health, Western Australia.

He has presented and published widely on medical leadership and engagement including co-authoring, with Peter Spurgeon and Chris Ham, Medical Leadership: from the dark side to centre stage.

Mark Sujan

Mark Sujan is Associate Professor of Patient Safety at Warwick Medical School. His background is in human factors and safety engineering. Mark’s research interest is on proactive methods for enhancing organisational resilience.

Since joining WMS in 2006, Mark has been involved in a number of Health Foundation funded projects including Safer Clinical Systems (SCS), Warwick & Imperial Study to Examine Reliability in Healthcare (WISER), Proactive Risk Monitoring in Healthcare (PRIMO) and a survey project exploring the use of Safety Cases in healthcare. He was Principal Investigator for a project funded by the NIHR SDO programme studying the potential for harm of clinical handover failures within the emergency care pathway.

Mark tries to maintain some level of involvement with traditional safety-critical industries; he has been teaching on the EUROCONTROL Human Factors for ATM Safety Actors course, and he has been involved in a European Single Sky ATM Research (SESAR) project looking at ways to model the effects of propagation of automation degradation.

Warwick Medical School
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom